Software company Third Light, based in Waterbeach, is helping with the International Football Association Board's (IFAB) Video Assistant Referee project.

The IFAB is the universal decision-making body for the laws of football. It safeguards, compiles and amends the laws where needed and tests any potential changes with experiments in selected matches or entire competitions.

March 2016 witnessed an historic AGM when a testing phase for video assistant referees was approved and Third Light’s technology has enabled reporting for this project.

Video assistant referees means decisions made by the ref can be reviewed, using video footage taken during the game.

IFAB’s testing phase is being carried out in 20 competitions worldwide over two years and is due to be reviewed in March 2018, when the board will decide whether to implement the process officially and extend its use to even more countries.

By then hundreds of matches will have been played, with 10-15 video clips per game, representing a valuable asset for research.

When a match is played, audio data and video clips are collected for specific incidents related to goals, penalty kicks, red cards and mistaken identity.

These clips are then uploaded to the Third Light platform and, by simply pressing a button, each clip is then appended with more data that’s gathered via a web-based questionnaire.

Each country has a project manager who is responsible for completing the questionnaire. The questionnaires are specific to the situation, so a penalty kick will return the penalty kick questions and the smart survey tool does this automatically.

Although this process uses more than one piece of software, everything is done using one interface to make the experience as simple and user-friendly as possible.

Once completed, all the data is exported together and can be used for statistical analysis so that The IFAB can easily analyse the results and take a final decision on the matter.

Third Light’s Simon Freytag said: “A bespoke build project like this could have cost a huge amount of money. It would have required components to manage and store the videos, and components to gather and store the data associated with each match and clip. But between IFAB’s team, the KU Leuven research team and our software engineers, we came up with a solution that combined two existing pieces of software, saving both time and money.

“Building a custom application that allows two pieces of existing technology to work together is often a cost-effective way of delivering a solution. Knowing that the existing software has already been tried and tested also provides assurance that it will do the job, without having to suffer rounds of bug fixing and excessive development time.”

Third Light was founded in 2002 and today has more than 550 clients. Its products are used by organisations such as the UN and Oxford University, brands that include NASCAR, Fujitsu, and Virgin and not-for-profits such as the Scouts and Guide Dogs.